Thursday, July 13, 2017

Staunton, July 13 –
While most Russians are focusing on Vladimir Putin’s latest move or Aleksey
Navalny’s plans or on mass repressions in Chechnya, “the Russia Federation is
rushing toward the most serioius crisis in nationality relations in recent
years … the problem of the status of Tatarstan,” according to Yevgeny Ikhlov (kasparov.ru/material.php?id=596716654952B).

Too few now remember that in 1992,
two republics refused to sign the Russian federation treaty, Chechnya and
Tatarstan. In the case of the first, Moscow became embroiled in two vicious
wars and oversaw the rise of the equally vicious current Chechen leader Ramzan
Kadyrov who remains in power thanks to his violence and Moscow’s massive
subventions.

In the case of the latter, Moscow
ultimately signed a power-sharing agreement that served as a symbol of that
republic’s unique status, helped keep the peace, and allowed the Volga republic
to be a major donor region. The original 1994 power-sharing accord was renewed
in 2007, but now the Kremlin has decided not to extend it. (For a discussion,
see windowoneurasia2.blogspot.com/2017/06/if-moscow-doesnt-extend-power-sharing.html).

The Tatarstan power-sharing
agreement is symbolically important in much the same ways the special
relationships between Berlin and Bavaria and between Washington and the US
state of Texas are: they symbolize the specialness of a relationship even if
they do not have many other consequences, and they help keep together entities
that might otherwise drift apart.

But Vladimir Putin with his
one-size-fits-all mentality and conviction that making any concession for one
group or institution threatens to bring down the entire structure of the
country has decided to let the accord lapse.By doing so, he is likely to get just the kind of political earthquake
that he fears.

On
the one hand, Tatars are furious. They feel betrayed. The republic
establishment has already called for an extension of the treaty and demanded
that what the accord allowed by extended even if no new agreement is signed in
the coming weeks. Moreover, Tatar nationalism is intensifying (svpressa.ru/politic/article/176673/ and politcom.ru/22593.html).

And on the other,
all other non-Russian republics and many predominantly ethnic Russian regions
as well are monitoring the situation, viewing what happens in and to Tatarstan
as a bellwether of what they can expect for themselves. If Moscow insists and
Kazan resists, that will not pass without consequences elsewhere.

The most dangerous, of course, is
that Tatarstan’s leadership in the name of preserving the rights to have a
president and special relations with Moscow could decide to mobilize their own nationalists
against Moscow, triggering ethnic conflicts in the republic and signaling to
others that this may be the only way to defend the rights of republics in the
age of Putin.

Moscow’s response would likely be
brutal, but the center would have only itself to blame. A major reason that no
Kazan Tatar leader has turned to the nationalists up to now is that he has a
power-sharing agreement that gives him much of what he wants. If Putin takes
that away as he appears to be planning, the Kazan elites may decide on a very
different course.

In an editorial today, Nezavimaya gazeta calls the
power-sharing agreement a relic of “the times of the parade of sovereignties,”
when Boris Yeltsin encouraged the non-Russian republics to “take as much
sovereignty as you can swallow” (ng.ru/editorial/2017-07-13/2_7028_red.html).

What the editors
ignore, however, is that the power-sharing agreement with Kazan was one of the
ways that “parade” was ended. The other involved wars in Chechnya and the rise
of Kadyrov’s Moscow-funded criminal state. It is intriguing that in its drive
for uniformity, the Putin regime should have failed to learn a lesson from
that.